Hormone tweak to boost mustard yield

Tweaking
a common plant hormone could protect brassica plants from blight and boost
mustard yields, scientists at the G. B. Pant University of Agriculture and
Technology report1.

Every
year, different regions of India report losing between 30-70% of mustard crops,
in part to diseases such as fungal blight. Other methods for protecting from
the disease and boosting production — such as creating transgenic plants,
cultivating blight-resistant strains, or spraying with fungicides — are difficult
to implement and can have negative impacts on the environment. As a result, the
country imports edible oil.

Jasmonic
acid is a small molecule known to play a role in plant development, and
effectively boosts model plants’ ability to resist blight. While there are several
proteins involved in the jasmonic acid pathway, the group decided to focus on a
protein that is known to interact directly with jasmonic acid, coronatine
insensitive-1 (COI1)2. “We have found that when jasmonic acid is applied it reduces the disease, but
it does not completely eliminate the disease. We wanted to identify some
molecules that are more effective than jasmonic acid,” said Dinesh Pandey, one
of the senior authors of the study.

Using
the nucleotide and amino acid sequence, they created a computer-based
structural model of COI1. Next, they tested how 760 molecules with structures
closely related to jasmonic acid interacted with their COI1 model. Three
molecules performed more effectively than jasmonic acid, and had promising cell
permeability characteristics.

Though
these early results are encouraging, the identified molecules still need to be
synthesized and tested in the field.